Watershed

– Monaghan Farm, Lanseria –

Like any artist, I find myself working within distinct modes of pre-occupation – I have, for example, modes of work which engage the complexities and contradictions of ‘modernism’, and then I have families of work which talk in curves and lines and horizons – and of course, I have families of work which work between the two.

This house is intimately engaged with its landscape, and it falls into my curved, landscape, horizon-inspired family of work. It has clear progenitors in my body of work, yet it is completely rooted in its own particular site and the character of its very particular owners. It is, for example, singularly tentacular.

When we first stood there, we looked over a grassy slope of potential – a bowl of a view, waiting to be cupped. A curve waiting to unfurl in response to the path of the overhead sun. A screen of stringy gums to the east. Behind us stood the slow upward incline of Monaghan farm, a slope waiting for the houses of others.